ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author is concerned with death as it is experienced in the human psyche through imagery and symbolic forms, as it is reflected in actual psychic mechanisms. She examines death and dying in relation to the concepts of ego and self, little and big self, in terms of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology, and explores them through a number of clinical cases, shows death’s crucial role in individuation, transformation, and change. It is desirable to distinguish death as a psychic state from the process of ‘dying’, a process that leads to the self, precedes and antedates it. Freud thought that the existence of the death drive could account for psychological phenomena like repetition compulsion, for sadism and masochism, for aggressivity, and for destructiveness of self or others. The inevitable interaction of life and death, growth and decay, and loss and gain is all too often shown and expressed in analysis.
